Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many prison officers who have received (a) severance and (b) redundancy packages since May 2010 have subsequently been re-employed as prison officers.

Between 1 May 2010 and 30 September 2015 60 prison officers left the prison service, received severance payments and have subsequently re-joined the National Offender Management Service as prison officers.

Over the last Parliament, NOMS delivered £334m prison efficiency savings and £169m savings in prison capacity management through prison closures and the introduction of benchmarking.

Voluntary exit was used in the last Parliament as a result of the closure of uneconomic prison places. These prison closures and benchmarking reforms have delivered savings of £300 million a year, with the average cost per prison place falling in real terms by 19% since 2009/10.

This figure is rounded to the nearest 10, with numbers ending in 5 rounded to the nearest multiple of 20 to prevent systematic bias. As with all HR databases, extracts are taken at a fixed point in time, to ensure consistency of reporting. However the database itself is dynamic, and where updates to the database are made late, subsequent to the taking of the extract, these updates will not be reflected in figures produced by the extract. For this reason, HR data are unlikely to be precisely accurate, and to present unrounded figures would be to overstate the accuracy of the figures. Rounding to 10 accurately depicts the level of certainty that is held with these figures.